There's been a flurry of opinion pieces and editorial in the Guardian about how two party politics is bad, how compromise should be the order of the day and how the left need to organise a progressive alliance.
Hmmm? Wasn't this the same newspaper that spent 5 years attacking Brexit and doing everything they could to stop it, by cheerleading for the EU? There wasn't much compromise then and actually not much compromise when it comes to being within the left in the latest split over transgender rights and feminists of the certain age.
In any case a progressive alliance i.e. Labour plus everyone except Farage and the DUP, assumes that the world is divided into Conservative and non Conservative. It is also indicative of a London mentality.
However this is somewhat misleading because as we know a centralist party like the liberal democrats was happy enough to put the Conservatives into power way back in 2015. The other part of this progressive alliance is the Greens. Who have 1 MP and not much votes. The last part of a progressive alliance would be the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists. Note they aren't leftist, but Nationalists. That is whether or not they have left wing mantras on social or economic policy, which is often more populist than leftist (e.g. tuition fees I often think are free so they can charge the English the full rate) , their overriding objective is to split Wales and Scotland from the UK and set up as Republics. They aren't interested in governing for the whole country, but just their little bit of it. The idea that you could include them in a progressive alliance is simply not practical, Okay so the SNP might bring itself to back legislation that sends the UK off onto a 'progressive' way, but at the same time it isn't going to work as they'd be hitting the exit door as soon as they could and thus collapsing any progressive government in the process. I can only conclude that Labour is the only serious choice for anyone how has left wing or progressive ideals.
The twin of a progressive alliance is the grand idea of proportional representation. This is liked by the liberal democrats because they believe that it would mean perpetual left wing government, on the assumption that the liberal democrats would always side with labour. In fact history has shown otherwise - not just for the lib dems- but also that PR would not mean that existing parties would stay together and or that the vote share would remain the same. You'd probably have a dozen labour parties and a dozen conservative parties .Added to that you'd probably have celebrity or one man band parties springing up all over the place and not just Farage , who'd probably end up as kingmaker : pace Israel the home of PR in which even the largest party gets about 20 out of 120 on a good election and you literally do get one man band parties springing up at one election, winning seats and then loosing them all at the next. Alternatively look at Italy, which has had PR and a mix of FPTP and PR. How many governments and coalitions has it had each year and how many 'technocratic' governments? PR seems democratic, but maybe not so much.
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